`Care Bears` Adventure` Fun Despite `Borrowed` Story

August 07, 1987|By Johanna Steinmetz.

Grab a neck pillow and any very young children who may be in your care and head for ``The Care Bears` Adventure in Wonderland.`` The kids will get 1 hour and 16 minutes of toxin-free, message-enriched entertainment, and you will get an air-conditioned nap.

It`s a dream of a movie, if only in the literal sense. The film means well; so it seems churlish to mention its total absence of originality. ``Care Bears`` poaches shamelessly on everything from ``The Wizard of Oz`` to

``Androcles and the Lion,`` but its greatest debt is to Lewis Carroll, whose engagingly warped mind would surely recoil at this confection.

Here, Alice is an adolescent girl pondering her ordinariness when the Care Bears--a sextet of stuffed animals--arrive on a rainbow arc to tell her she has a mission to perform: She must impersonate the Princess of Wonderland, who has been kidnaped by the evil Wizard to prevent her from inheriting her mother`s throne, which will then pass to the Wizard.

With the Care Bears as her guardians, Alice passes through her looking glass into Wonderland, pursuing a path to the Queen`s palace much as Dorothy sought the Emerald City. Along the way, she meets such Wonderland fixtures as the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter. Acting as villains are Tweedledee and Tweedledum (redubbed Dim and Dum), the Jabberwocky and the Wizard, who bears a striking resemblance to the evil queen in ``Snow White.`` One of the Care Bears, named Grumpy, acts like the Disney dwarf of the same name, and the Jabberwocky has been rendered in the style of monster author Martin Mayer. Jabberwocky`s a raging giant, made docile when a thorn is removed from his paw. Is there a copyright lawyer in the house?

All this mishmash is slickly animated, beginning with the syrupy pastels of Care Bears land, called Care-A-Lot (Puh-leeze!), where inhabitants take wake-up calls by a chorus of twinkling stars (Pretty please?) and sit in heart-shaped chairs and powder their heart-shaped noses in heart-shaped mirrors (Pretty please with . . . oh, forget it). There`s very little to catch the adult eye, but children no doubt will drink this all in.

Where the film does excel--in fact, where it gets its only punch--is in its soundtrack. This is thanks chiefly to John Sebastian, who wrote an inspired rap song for the Cheshire Cat, a Noel Cowardish ditty for the Mad Hatter (``You like hats? I`m maaad about hats!``) and an anthem for the Wizard with faint echoes of Tom Lehrer. Getting in the spirit of the production, he also concocted a woozy little ballad that sounds a lot like ``Yellow Submarine.``

The Care Bears themselves are really just accessories in these goings-on, there to rescue Alice when she gets in a jam by issuing magic beams from the hearts on their chests, and to dole out strokes as needed, as in: ``But you are special, Alice. You`ve proven that by caring enough to come here in the first place.``

Parents attending the ``Care Bears`` movie may conclude that encomium is meant for them.

``THE CARE BEARS` ADVENTURE IN WONDERLAND`` (STAR)(STAR) 1/2

Directed by Raymond Jafelice; story by Peter Sauder; screenplay by Susan Snooks and John De Klein; songs written and performed by John Sebastian;

animation directed by John Laurence Collins; edited by Rob Kirkpatrick;